


Harvest Time

by Zenthisoror



Series: In Death Finitely Noted [1]
Category: Death Note
Genre: Afterlife, Axeman - Freeform, Crack, Gen, Post-Canon, Reincarnation, definitely crack, twist - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 03:43:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5232653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zenthisoror/pseuds/Zenthisoror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Light wakes up as a tree and doesn't get to enjoy the experience for very long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harvest Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raconteur-incognito (MicrobeQueen)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Raconteur-incognito+%28MicrobeQueen%29), [fictier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictier/gifts), [obviouslystiles](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=obviouslystiles).



> This began as a crack prompt and perhaps ended up as crack horror. Or karma. Or what goes around, comes around.

Light blinked with eyes that didn’t exist.

 

Slowly he became aware of weight, of strength, of support, that he was standing tall and heavy upon moist soil. He could feel a strange upward itch, a crawling at the tips of his branches.

 

 _Water_ , he thought in a daze. Water being pulled up through a network of xylem, evaporating from microscopic pores.

 

He felt warmth as if he was holding up the flat of his palms to the sun from a thousand hands.

 

_Leaves._ _Gas exchange._ _The miracle of photosynthesis._

 

He didn’t understand how he could possibly be thinking, how he could be sensing without a nervous system to process the information, but there was clearly a way in which trees managed.

 

And then it hit him - like the car crushed against his trunk, its bonnet crumpled and sparking, had no doubt hit him.

 

He was a tree.

 

A sentient tree, but a tree no less, and by some quirk of fate, he had evaded oblivion and dropped back into the samsara cycle.

 

Now, there was the problem of the car at his foot (feet?), with the red splattered over the inside the shattered front window, the deflated airbags, and the local gang of children prodding at it with sticks.

 

He strained his leaves and opened the stomata to increase airflow and better hear their conversation.

 

“Told you!” said one of the boys, a little bucktoothed hoodlum who seemed to be the leader. He gestured at Light. “See! I told you it’s cursed.

 

“That’s the forty-ninth time this year a car’s crashed into that tree!” the boy went on, caught up in his tale and Light listened with interest. “With no survivors!”

 

The little gang looked as one at the tree, who (which?) was, Light realised with a preen of satisfaction, quite a magnificent Japanese oak.

 

“What happens if one of us touches it?” whispered a girl, staring at the tree in awed reverence.

 

Fear? They feared him? That could be used to his advantage, to gain some control over the situation!

 

Light concentrated on his leaves and tried for a menacing rustle.

 

The snot-faced little boy that had been approaching him with its sticky fingers cringed and skittered back to his friends.

 

“You get bad luck,” said the first boy with conviction. “Lots of it. I touched it and got extra maths homework for a week.”

 

“Our PE teacher made us all play tennis until we fainted when I touched it,” said a girl fervently.

 

Light rustled his leaves again. The children took a step back, and it was then that something happened.

 

A strange figure appeared behind the children, tall, hazy like a desert mirage.

 

Where the light struck it rippled and shifted, as if the light was uncertain as to whether it ought to be reflecting off anything at all. To Light’s unease, the children didn’t seem to realise it was there at all, and it didn’t seem the kind of thing that rustling his leaves menacingly at would help with.

 

“Who wants ice lollies?” said the first boy suddenly,and before Light knew it, the gang of children were chattering and moving away from him and the crashed car - the cursed, and now quietly anxious, tree forgotten in their excitement for ice lollies.

 

Light was now alone with the figure that wasn’t there.

 

It wasn’t there and yet he could feel its gaze on him.

 

He could see the line of its hood and the drape of its robes.

 

He could hear the silken hiss of a summer breeze being cut in two like hair.

 

He could see a thin line of darkness when the bending light split against the edge of a very sharp axe.

 

And it glided towards him across the road with its axe in hand.

 

“Are you awake?”

 

It spoke in a voice of silences, the gaps between the words.

 

_Did it expect him to reply?_

“Yes, yes,” it said, the distant noise of traffic parting around its words, “I quite understand your situation. That’ll do though.”

 

_Was it worth asking what it was or would showing his ignorance put him at a disadvantage?_

 

“Neither, I’m afraid.”

 

_Damn it._

 

“Forty nine times,” it said, and hands that weren’t there caressed a curved axe blade that wasn’t there either. “It happened rather sooner than we expected, but you are clearly a very precocious individual.”

 

What did it want with him? Why was Light feeling so suddenly cold despite the summer sun on his leaves and trunk?

 

“Come now, you’re an intelligent young tree with the poisonous cursed spirit of a mass murderer that nobody would miss at the core. I am here with an axe. What do you think I am here for?”

 

But Light had only just woken up. Light could barely remember his own name. Light could barely remember the names of his feelings or the feeling of being human. His memories from his other life were only just surfacing.

 

“You’d be miserable with those back, I assure you. Well, there comes a time for all souls sooner or later.” A car drove past them, an old song blaring from its windows - Yesterday, the Beatles- and spinning dust off its wheels. Dust didn’t bend around the figure like the light did. It swirled straight through it as it hefted the axe to its shoulders.

 

“I go by three names,” it said. “By day I am the Feller. By noon I am the Pulper, and by night, I am the Bookmaker.”

 

The Bookmaker. Something about that chimed with the still hidden pieces of Light’s mind, with something woven through his memories like a thorny vine or the links of a chain.

 

“There is no heaven or hell.”

 

As Light tried to work out what it was he was missing, the Bookmaker, or perhaps Feller, since it was still daylight, drew closer. Summer, space and time flowed around it.

 

“There is only nothing. Everything came from nothing and to nothing everything returns, unless it becomes something else.

 

"To become something eternal is to become something static and unchanging. It is the same as becoming nothing without the relief of non-existence. You will feel your own oblivion.”

 

_Wait…_

 

The figure patted his trunk and the space in the air shifted, as if a hand had stroked a shape into the fabric of reality into the folds of a smile.

 

“You developed quite nicely,” the Bookmaker told him, sounding pleased and Light shivered from roots to tips of his leaves. “I look forward to seeing what kind of Death Note your paper will make.”

 

With a roar and a scream like water rushing through too narrow pipes, Light’s memories flooded back to him in the same instant as the Bookmaker raised its axe.

 

_Wait!_

 

Darkness gleamed on the edge of the blade.

 

And Light retreated, withdrew into the cold, dark bubble and fizz of the tree core, tried to run from the swinging blade.

 

But the axe that wasn’t there was more real than he was. It was more real than any dark, any cold, any heart of the tree, for it was Death and it was absolute. It hunted him down as he tried to bury himself in his memories and hide in the meagre fragments of his mind that had only begun to stir again…

 

...and it cut through all of them for the ghosts of memories that they were.

 

There was nowhere to go but to let the axe find him.

 

It found him alone without even his mind to comfort him.

 

Nobody heard the sound of Light’s soul being cut and harvested, shredded and pulped, then scraped over a rack and dried, spread thin as the leaves of his tree, for it made none after the fall of the axe.

  
That night he was bound in a new skin and threaded through with gut, and the Bookmaker, immortalising him in the pulped pages of a notebook, trapped him in the oblivion of eternity.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I regret nothing.


End file.
